Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Coupling optical fibers to optical elements, such as optical waveguides or other optical fibers, may require a high degree of accuracy in alignment, both for multimode optical fibers and even more so for single mode optical fibers and optical waveguides. Aligning a single mode optical fiber may be achievable during the manufacturing process, however, lower tolerance of the single mode optical fiber may result in a higher cost of manufacture and a greater degree of difficulty for alignment in the field. Aligning multiple single mode optical fibers, such as in an optical fiber ribbon, may be very challenging as each single mode fiber in the ribbon may have its own inaccuracies, yet all of the single mode fibers in the ribbon have to be aligned with minimum loss.
Optical fiber cable splicing, the conventional technique for optical fiber coupling performed in the field, may be labor intensive, costly, and error prone. Splicing may be defective and involve rework due to disturbed alignments in the coupling of the optical fibers. Given that a majority of the optical fibers is deployed in data centers or in the field, aligning optical fibers in the field rather than at the time of manufacture or by splicing may lead to higher yield connections at lower cost.